IT WOULD BE HARD TO BE A NEWS-CONSUMING CANADIAN
NOWADAYS WITHOUT NOTICING THAT INDIGENOUS ISSUES HAVE
MOVED TO THE FOREFRONT OF THE CANADIAN CONSCIOUSNESS.
the criminally poor record keeping at
the schools. It is a sobering fact too, that
many of the people charged with keeping records at the schools may have had
some level of complicity in the abuse
and deaths of students. Children could
disappear from the system without leaving so much as a legal ripple. Young
children, some little more than toddlers,
were left at the mercy of teachers and
staff who had the power to act with
almost complete impunity - and they
did. For those of you with strong stomachs, the final reports can be accessed
at www.trc.ca.
For just under one-third of reported
deaths (32 per cent), the government
and the schools did not record the name
of the student who died. For just under
one-quarter of these deaths (23 per cent),
the government and the schools did not
record the gender of the student who
died. For just under one-half of these
deaths (49 per cent), the government
and the schools did not record the cause
of death. Parents might not be given the
news until after the funeral. Indeed, for
most of the history of the schools, the
practice was not to send the bodies of
students who died at school back to
their home communities. Most of the
cemeteries that the Commission documented, where they are known at all,
are abandoned, disused, and vulnerable
to accidental disturbance.
The goal of the TRC's report is not to
merely assign blame, but to further the
cause of reconciliation; to drag the broken relationship between Canada and
Indigenous Peoples into the light so that
the wounds inflicted on its most vulnerable victims can be healed. It won't be
easy. For centuries, the Settler society
has treated Indigenous peoples as second-class citizens (when it has acknowledged them as human at all). The notion
that First Peoples are too primitive, unreliable, ignorant, or child-like to take care
of themselves is a Colonial narrative that
runs deep though the legal and social
fabric of Canadian society.
Most Canadians would be shocked to
find that there were rules on the books
prohibiting First Nations people from
practising their religions, hiring lawyers,
or owning property that were in effect
well into the 20th Century (and, in some
cases, beyond). Similarly, a person could
legally lose their Indigenous identity if
they married a non-Indigenous person,
received a university degree, or became
a doctor or lawyer. Rules that would
never have been tolerated in the rest
of Canadian society were (and remain)
a thing that Indigenous peoples must
navigate on a daily basis.
As the final report of the TRC pushed
Indigenous issues to the forefront of the
Canadian consciousness, the country
has wrestled to come to grips with the
burden of our shared history. We are a
prosperous country, particularly compared to other nation-states in the Old
World, and we have achieved that prosperity in a scant 150 years. The growing
consensus as to why this is the case is
that almost the entire land mass of the
country, and every resource under, in,
on or above it, was obtained virtually for
free, from the First Peoples who lived on
it. That debt, which has been maturing
for some time, appears to have come
due. How it will be paid remains to be
seen. What is clear, however, is that there
are many opportunities for individuals,
groups, communities and institutions to
contribute to the cause of reconciliation.
The final report of the TRC ends with 94
"Calls to Action" that both the federal
government and the Province of Ontario
are working hard to implement. Some of
these calls to action have implications for
cemetery professionals. These include:
71. We call upon all chief coroners and
provincial vital statistics agencies
that have not provided to the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission of
Canada their records on the deaths
72.
73.
74.
75.
of Aboriginal children in the care
of residential school authorities to
make these documents available
to the National Centre for Truth
and Reconciliation.
We call upon the federal government to allocate sufficient resources
to the National Centre for Truth
and Reconciliation to allow it to
develop and maintain the National
Residential School Student Death
Register established by the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission
of Canada.
We call upon the federal government
to work with churches, Aboriginal
communities, and former residential school students to establish and
maintain an online registry of residential school cemeteries, including,
where possible, plot maps showing
the location of deceased residential
school children.
We call upon the federal government to work with the churches
and Aboriginal community leaders
to inform the families of children
who died at residential schools
of the child's burial location, and
to respond to families' wishes for
appropriate commemoration ceremonies and markers, and reburial
in home communities where
requested.
We call upon the federal government to work with provincial, territorial, and municipal governments,
churches, Aboriginal communities,
former residential school students,
and current landowners to develop
and implement strategies and procedures for the ongoing identification, documentation, maintenance,
commemoration, and protection
of residential school cemeteries
or other sites at which residential
school children were buried. This
is to include the provision of appropriate memorial ceremonies and
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